Eric Betts's favorites

Favorite sessions for this user

The strength of your community is the best predictor of your project's long-term viability. What happens when your community is gradually infiltrated by assholes, who infect everyone else with their constant negativity and personal attacks? This talk will teach you about the dramatic impact assholes are having on your organization today and will show you how you can begin to repair it.

Learning how Open source communities work is an important skill in today's job market, but many college students fail to join projects. Come learn how the School of EECS at Oregon State University is working to motivate students, and help them overcome the barriers of joining open source projects through Beaversource.

Come and learn some useful command-line short cuts and shell idioms that will make you vastly more productive in a Linux or Unix shell. Time permitting, we'll even play "stump the expert", so bring your thorniest shell problems.

As a long-time user of open source software, I've often considered myself an advocate but not necessarily a participant. Over the last year and a half, my own search for technical inspiration has led me full-circle to the realization that I'm an active member of a vibrant community of technical women.

Software programming has come a long way for students and younger children since the days of Logo. Syntax has been replaced with connecting blocks and the triangle turtle has been replaced with custom artwork children create themselves. Now, multi-threading and event processing are easier to teach children than functions, and this session discusses these ideas as well as so the edge of kid code.

Bring your laptop with Python installed and follow along as we go through examples from a 21st century high school mathematics curriculum, such as we're currently prototyping and implementing in niche markets.

Meditation is the ultimate open source tool. You can do it anywhere and it’s free. It requires only your brain and your body. It’s positive effects are numerous, including increased productivity, better problem-solving and a reduction in overall stress. Learn about long-term effects of mediation on the brain, some meditation techniques and how mediation can help you do your job better.

The open source ecosystem operates at human scale, and yet the most popular social networks today are mammoths, where an open source citizen has limited agency with little to no ability to change her environment. Furthermore, efforts like OpenSocial serve to further limit what independents can build outside of the major networks, culminating in a threat the very essence of what makes the open/open source community thrive: choice and marketplace competition guaranteed through the ability to fork.

Government consumes lots of technology and, with the stimulus dollars poised to invest heavily in information technology, spending will increase sharply over the next several years. The potential benefits to using open source software in the public sector may seem intuitively obvious. But what if you own a small business or are an independent developer/contractor? Can the little guy do business with a big bureaucracy? And what IS the government doing to pursue open source today?